I have the first two floors of converted 5 story 1900s row-house with 12 foot ceilings in the bedroom and no doors (the entire second floor is one room plus a long hallway leading to internal stairs). After the people above me moved out and I worked with the upstairs owner to replace his hardwood flooring at a cost of $5000 to me and $2000 to him. The installer put in 1/4 inch cork underlay under 2 1/4 inch red oak. The installer said that should abate the noise enough for normal footsteps to not wake me up at night. After reading obsessively on this and other blogs, this made sense to me (tackle the problem at the source).

Now that new people are moving in, I see that it did little, if anything for footfall noise. So now I'm back to square one and 5k poorer (though I'm trying to recover a thousand or two from the upstairs owner). I hate to keep throwing good money after bad, but I'd also like to get through a night without being startled awake. I now REALLY wish I had spent the 5k elsewhere. Do you have any recommendations about what to do next? My budget is severely diminished so I'm looking for a solution under a thousand dollars.

sorry to hear this, it is a most common problem and footfall/ impact happens to be one of the hardest to reduce.In my experience if the ceiling below is not on clip and channel or at least Resilient channel most underlayment material will never reach top performance.

unfortunately the best systems require a floor height increase of 2.5" or more to accommodate a decoupled flooring system.

Based on your budget at this point you could do what we call a "Band-aid" which could give you another 15% reduction depending on your square footage.

How many square feet do you have?what year was this place built?is the ceiling insulated or hollow?

Thank you for your reply!5 story 1900s row house split into 5 units. (front of floors 1-2 (us), back of floors 1-2, entire third floor (problem apartment), front of floors 4-5, back of floors 4-5)Upstairs square feet is about 300 in a P shape (room that faces street and a long exposed brick hallway that ends at a stairwell and a shared wall).

I'm pretty sure my ceiling is hollow dry wall. I was considering cutting a hole in the dry-wall ceiling to blow insulation in there, but have read if there are any gaps, this won't help.

well if it is hollow most anything you do will not deliver full performance of the material.The "Band-aid" would be to add another layer of 5/8" drywall and green glue in between (3 tube per 4x8' sheet of drywall) In this situation I am sorry to say that your best bet would be to invest the money and remove the drywall and install a soundproof decoupled ceiling system using isolation clips and hat channel...I understand your budget constraints, however I am just unsure you would be satisfied with anything less then a 50% reduction.